Volleyball earns split at Wellsville Tournament

The Eudora volleyball team is gearing up for the stretch run. After going 2-2 Saturday at the Wellsville Tournament, the Cardinals are hoping the momentum they built carries into this weekend’s De Soto Spikefest.

“Every tournament we try to get stronger and try to place higher,” Stutler said. “So by the league tournament we’re in a groove, we’re in synch with each other. So that final week before sub-state, we’re peaking at the right time. So our goal this weekend is we’ve got to get stronger. There’s a chance we’ll see Tonganoxie again and we’ll see De Soto for the first time. So there’ll be some scrappy teams there.”

At the Wellsville Tournament, Eudora beat Baldwin and Waverly and lost to Osage City and Anderson County.

“In the Baldwin match, the two games that we won we played our best ball,” Stutler said. “We were dominating at the net blocking-wise and that carried us through all three games. We kind of had a little lapse in the game that we lost, we spotted them a couple points and couldn’t comeback. But it was a great match.”

Against Waverly, Eudora kept its opponent on its heels with solid serve and receive.

“We took out some of their stronger hitters and forced them to go outside a little more,” Stutler said. “And we took advantage of their mistakes.”

Against Osage and Anderson County, the Cardinals had leads but couldn’t hold them.

“In both of those matches we kind of gave it away,” Stutler said. “We came back and fought to take it to three and we had a couple rotations where we spotted too many points and didn’t stop it quick enough.”

Only the top two teams at the tournament advanced out of poolplay and Eudora finished third. Stutler was encouraged by her team’s performance, which was much better than it was at the Tonganoxie Invitational.

“All in all, we had better chemistry,” Stutler said. “We had a couple kids step in. Victoria Lehmanm did pretty well for us in Morgan’s spot and Shea (Lounsbury) and Allie (Johnson) started to connect better out of the middle. So we saw some positive things out of the day.”